I am walking a line between committing my life to God, and leaving him alltogether. But I need a few questions answered.
I am 20 years old and I live in an apartment with my boyfriend. This move took a lot of thought (3 years of a long distance relationship) and I decided that at this point that was the best option for our relationship.
Living with him has brought on several wonderful new experiances in my life. One of which is the want/need for faith. I had strayed from Christianity long ago, feeling that the people in my church were to closed minded and unaccepting.
I now have the urge to come back to Christ; but if he is going to shun me for "Living in Sin" with my boyfriend, whom I love dearly, then this is not for me...
A have a good friend who's a preacher in New Jersey. 0ne day, when I visited his church's Sunday AM service, there was a point in the service where he called the littl children of the church up to the front of the church and had them sit in a semi-circle.
In front of the children, he placed a Mason jar with candy in it and picked one little boy to reach in a pull out a piece of candy.
So, the little boy reaches into the jar and grabs the candy and learns something very important about grabing candy out of a jar: when you put your hand in, there's plenty of room, but when you grab something in the jar and try to pull it out, your hand changes shape from a flat hand to a fish and the fist is bigger than the opening. That means that you cannot pull it out.
So the boy now has his hand in the jar and his fist wrapped around the candy and is starting to become more and more agitated as he learns that his hand is stuck.
Finally, my preacher friend looks down and says "what's the matter? Don't you want the candy?"
The boy says, "I'm stuck! My hand won't come out!"
Most of the adults are chuckling because they've seen my friend's point.
He kneels down where the boy is sitting and says, "You know, that's just how sin works. It looks good and we really want it so we reach in and grab it but then, when we try to get free, we can't.
If you want your hand to be free of that jar, then what you have to do is to let go of the candy, just like we have to let go of our sin."
The boy pulls his hand out, my friend shakes the jar and the candy comes out for all of the children.
Now, you're facing a similar situation. You say that you want to follow Christ, but not if it means giving up your sin.
Unless you let go of that sin give it to Christ, you're going to be just as trapped by it as that little boy was in his jar.
I think part of the problem is that you've misunderstood what it means to follow Christ. If you love your sin more than Christ, then you don't belong to Christ and He says that you're not worthy to follow Him. If you love your boyfriend more than Christ, then you need to remember that Jesus calls us to such a devotion to Him that our own love for our family and loved ones seems like hatred in comparison.
I can cite a whole bunch of Bible verses to you to show that if you keep on living in sin, you're not a Christian, but just ask yourself this: how can you ask Jesus to save you from something you don't want to stop doing?
How can you ask Jesus to crucify your flesh when you would rather give yourself over to your flesh and serve sin?
Here's praying that you will do the right thing.
that we'll all understand what we need to,
